Rodney Campbell's Blog

I attended the Sun Tech Days Australia event here in Sydney this week along with the Community Events day on the last day. I primarily attended the Solaris and OpenSolaris tracks and found some good nuggets of information there.

Some of the most interesting information I heard were from the Virtualization Technologies sessions. I was already aware of technologies like Domains, LDOMs and Zones/Containers and had planned to take a serious look at the Hypervisor style technologies like Sun xVM/OpenSolaris xVM (based on Xen) which are now built into the latest OpenSolaris SXDE and SXCE builds.

I use and am quite familiar with the common Type 2 Hypervisor (HVM) style products like VMware and Parallels. I’ve used both predominantly on my MacBook pro, however I was previously unaware of the VirtualBox product which Sun only very recently acquired from Innotek. These guys have apparently been around for some time however it is only since the Sun acquisition that word has really started to spread. There are two really compelling features of VirtualBox which make it very interesting:

1. Whilst it also has Windows and (many) Linux versions like some other competing products, and even a Mac OS X version like some others – VirtualBox also works on OpenSolaris!
2. VirtualBox is Open Source (GPL2) and FREE!

I plan to blog soon about my experience with running the new OpenSolaris Developer Preview 2 (Indiana) using VirtualBox on my MacBook Pro and later on I plan to try out both VirtualBox and xVM on a new Sun Ultra 24 running OpenSolaris (Solaris Express Developer Edition Build 79b) with various guests (Windows, OpenSolaris, Linux and perhaps even OS X).

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